This application claims the priority based on Korean Patent Application No. 2002-29119, filed on May 25, 2002, in the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a fast, convenient voice dialing apparatus and method by which users can efficiently and conveniently apply a telephone number digit recognition engine to number dialing.
2. Description of the Related Art
Related art voice dialing techniques include the following methods: a talker-dependent voice recognition method in which a user speaks voice-registered names; a talker-independent voice recognition method in which a user speaks the name of a person stored in a telephone number directory; and a method in which a user speaks each of the digits of a telephone number. To achieve a convenient telephone connection using mobile phones, the related art talker-independent voice recognition engine, which does not need a voice registration process, is preferred to the related art talker-dependent voice recognizer, which needs voice registration.
In the case of the above related art method in which the user speaks telephone number digits, different lengths of telephone numbers cause very different degrees of recognition accuracy. If a wrong digit appears due to a wrong recognition in the middle of voice dialing, only the wrong digit must be corrected, which causes inconvenience to a user. To correct only the wrong digit, the user must carefully watch a LCD, move the cursor to the place of the wrong digit, and then voice the correct digit or alternatively, press an appropriate digit key. No matter how many digits are wrong, the wrong digit(s) can also be corrected by re-voicing the whole telephone number digits. However, each of these methods causes inconveniences to the user.
Since a voice recognizer cannot know where a voicing error has occurred and how serious the voicing error is, even if a user re-voices the telephone number, the probability of correctly voicing the whole telephone number digits is no greater than as before. Also, since the number of telephone number digits that can be remembered by a user is limited, telephone numbers with 7 or more digits are hard to be voiced, and it is not effective to voice frequently-used telephone numbers. Furthermore, since a voice recognition engine can produce an excessively large number of digit strings, recognition speed and performance are degraded.
When a related art telephone number digit string composed of 7 digits or more is voiced according to the conventional telephone number digit voicing method, a voice recognition engine cannot effectively recognize the long digit string. As a result, the user is inconvenienced when voicing the digits of the long telephone number. Particularly, if a recognition result was wrong because of noise or other factors generated during recognition, the user must re-voice the telephone number that has already been voiced, which is ineffective.
Also, if a user remembers a telephone number registered in a telephone number directory but does not remember the person's name corresponding to the telephone number, the related art talker-independent voice recognition method cannot be used.